Book

Please, Go On: ELIZA’s ongoing legacy 

MIT Press, Software Studies series. 

With the help of MIT librarians, members of our team have recovered the code of the ELIZA program on which the DOCTOR script runs, inspiring our in-depth reading of the code and script, drawing on the methods of Critical Code Studies. ELIZA is the conversation platform on which many different kinds of scripts can run. The famous script called DOCTOR, although often synonymous with ELIZA, was offered as a demonstration of one of many possibilities for the ELIZA conversational system. Beginning with the history and context of the program, we are writing a book that examines ELIZA from its code to its impact on technoculture. In our book, our team of  scholars, creators, and programmers show how this program influenced the history of computing while also forever entangling it with problematic assumptions of gender and class. While DOCTOR may be a gender-neutral name for the psychotherapist, ELIZA bears the legacy of its namesake ELIZA Doolittle from “My Fair Lady,” a tale of class, gender, and even racial and ethnic social formation, reverberating through the development of chatbots in everything from the abusive output of Microsoft’s Tay to the misogynistic way people talk to and program Alexa.  Our reading attends these complexities of identity, psychology, power, and ethics as we trace the legacy of Weizenbaum’s provocative program.